Financial Shocks and the Relative Dynamics of Tangible and Intangible Investment: Evidence from the Euro Area

Abstract

We develop an extended real business cycle (RBC) model with financially con-strained firms and non-pledgeable intangible capital. Based on a model-consistentseries for firms' borrowing conditions, we find, within a structural vector autoregres-sion (SVAR) framework, that, in response to an adverse financial shock, tangible in-vestment falls more than intangible investment. This positive co-movement betweentangible and intangible investment as well as the relative resilience of intangibleinvestment pose a challenge for the theoretical model. We show that investment-specific adjustment costs help in reconciling the model with the observed empiricalevidence. The estimation of the theoretical model using a Bayesian limited infor-mation approach yields support for the presence of much larger adjustment costsfor intangible investment than for tangible investment.